Japanese AI startup SakanaAI to receive major investment, may become a unicorn
TapTechNews June 17th news, according to the report of Asahi Shimbun last Saturday, the Japanese generative AI startup SakanaAI is about to receive a new major investment, which will bring the company's valuation to approximately 180 billion yen (approximately $1.31 billion). Driven by the global AI investment boom, this means a new "unicorn" enterprise will be born in Japan.
"Unicorn" refers to an unlisted enterprise with a valuation of more than $1 billion (approximately ¥72.76 billion). It is reported that last July, Google's artificial intelligence researchers established SakanaAI in Tokyo , and the company conducted research on the basic models of AI that generate text and images. It has a "groundbreaking" technology of cross-referencing existing models with each other to create high-performance AI models.
The main investors of SakanaAI include venture capitalists who have made early investments in companies such as OpenAI. They will coordinate to invest approximately 20 billion yen (about ¥923 million at present) in SakanaAI by the end of this month. According to the report, SakanaAI will become the fastest-growing "unicorn" enterprise in Japan.
According to TapTechNews' previous report, the market research institute CBInsights released a report earlier this month, and the data shows that as of the end of April this year, there were 37 "unicorn" enterprises in the field of generative AI. Compared with 20 at the end of April last year, the number of AI "unicorn" enterprises has almost doubled in the past year, and the trend of targeting the new generation of potential technologies is pushing up corporate valuations.
US enterprises still account for 90% of the share of AI unicorn enterprises, and among the 17 new enterprises added in the past year, 10 have their main bases located outside the US.
China has added 5 unicorn enterprises in the past year, including Dark Side of the Moon, MiniMax, ZeroOne All, Baichuan Intelligence and Zhipu AI, and these enterprises have all received investment from Alibaba Group.